I Became
by CardioQueen
Summary: Bang. 3.133.14 One Shot.


I was 9 when he died.

Nine is too soon to lose somebody you love, for somebody that you love to give up on you.

It was an abdominal aortic aneurysm.

He died from a broken heart.

Okay, not technically a broken heart, but that's how the surgeon explained it to me when I was nine years old, and it's the only explanation I've come to accept, because I've seen how painful a triple A is, and I know how fast that a person goes down from it.

And I can't bear to think that my father died like that.

So, when I was nine years old, I decided that I wouldn't ever love anybody ever again, because in my nine year old brain, if I loved somebody, something would happen to them that they would die.

That they would leave.

That they would disappear from my life as quickly as my dad did.

_I became detached._

So I decided that I'd be a surgeon instead. One that fixed broken hearts.

I wanted to be just like my dad's surgeon because he didn't care. He seemed to move with an air about him that people respected, but he spoke with an eloquence and a detachment that I admired in my traumatized state.

He didn't care.

And I didn't want to.

_I became focused. _

My days of dreaming of dancing as a principle with the American Ballet Theatre had died with my dad, the only one who ever bothered to coming to my recitals and I decided that I would be a surgeon.

Life with my mother was drastically different. She was cold, cruel. Always reminding me that I should've stayed with her all along, always saying that she didn't want to send me with my father because she knew that eventually something like this would happen and then she'd have to take me and it was a such a hassle to move me in.

I was nothing but a major inconvenience for her.

When I quit ballet she forced me into something else, so I rode horses instead. I never really tried. It just came naturally, but I'd see the pride in her eyes when I won, so I'd try a little harder.

I think maybe that's why I had to be best at everything.

I didn't have to be the best for my dad. I was good enough just as I was.

But second place wasn't good enough for my mother. It never would be. She made me need to be the best, not just want it.

And I kept riding.

I kept riding until I got second place, and my mother acted as if the entire world was crashing around her.

_I became driven. _

I went to college and excelled in everything, and when the girls that I knew were getting married and starting families, I was starting another degree program, starting medical school.

I didn't understand their need to love anymore.

I didn't care about love.

I vaguely remembered loving once, but the bitterness had filled my heart from him leaving me and I didn't care about what it was like to love.

Being bitter was easier than loving someone.

_I became cold._

I finished med school, top of my class at Stanford. I had degrees and credentials unlike most my age, and I went to Seattle Grace Hospital to study under 'the' Preston Burke that I had intended on putting to shame upon completing my fellowship 11 years later.

I would watch everything he did, and I would do it better.

I would find a way to repair an abdominal aortic aneurysm without complication, so that another little girl wouldn't have to lose her father.

Then I stood face to face with him in a stairwell, his grasp on my shoulders firm, his face inches from mine, and I felt this...thing, and I still can't put words to it to this day what it was.

_I became confused._

It all happened so fast, there was coffee and kisses and keys and commitment and before I knew it I was falling fast, and there was nothing to catch me.

Suddenly I was looking forward to seeing him at the end of the day, I was calling his apartment home.

I was telling him that I loved him.

_I became weak._

I tried to fool myself, to tell myself that it was just a crush and I inundated myself with work and coworkers.

Surgeries and sutures.

Anything to find myself again.

I had even convinced myself that he wasn't worth it, and that I was going to leave him the first chance that I got.

That I was going to get my life back.

But then he got shot.

_I became scared._

I'd only loved one other like I came to love him, and he died when I was nine.

He disappeared, he left me. He made me the way I was, he took his broken heart and he broke mine and I didn't want it fixed.

Then came along Preston Burke and fixed it.

And ruined me.

Then he got shot.

I tried to be there for him, tried going to him more than once, and I couldn't do it. I couldn't see him like that. I couldn't see him reduced to a hospital bed, his body weak and broken.

_I became guilty._

I couldn't stay by his side. I couldn't watch him leave.

So I stayed away, peeking in, looking for a glimpse of him every once in a while, looking for the man that I loved.

But I couldn't see him past the lines and the tubes and the sutures and the surgery.

I couldn't see him.

And I couldn't find myself without him.

_I became lost._

Denny had died, and Izzie was there clinging to him. And though I thought there were words for me to say.

Some sort of words to make it all better, I knew in my heart that there was nothing to make it better.

Nothing would make that hurt go away.

I knew that pain all too well.

It was in that moment that I came to realize that I needed him, and he needed me.

_I became dependent. _

Somewhere along the way, all of these things had happened, and just when I was finding myself, he got lost.

I wasn't sure how to fix it, or how to make it better, but I tried.

My trying wasn't good enough, though, and in the end the only thing it did was blow up in my face.

Well, it didn't blow up in my face. He just closed the door in my face.

With anybody else, it would've ended there.

They would've given up.

But I had changed.

_I became committed._

We didn't talk for weeks, no words to be said, no touching, no kissing, no sleeping in the same bed, and it became painfully obvious to me in those weeks exactly how dependent upon him I'd become.

How committed to him that I'd become.

I think though, it was when it really became clear to him.

Because now he's standing in front of me, on bended knee with a ring in his hand and asking me to be his wife.

And for the first time in my life, I'm not scared to love him even more, because I know what life without him would be like, and I'm more scared of not having him, not loving him.

_I will become his wife._


End file.
